The Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference opens September 25, and it looks to be a significant scientific event.
The conference opening should be particularly interesting, even for non-scientists, as it will match the director of the Bush administration's official Climate Change Research Program, Dr. James Mahoney, with Dr. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. Dr. Caldeira has made the abstract of his talk available, and it's pretty serious:
Continued emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will affect climate and ocean chemistry. [...] From the perspective of geology and biological evolution, these changes would occur rapidly, overwhelming most natural processes that would buffer CO2 changes occurring over longer time intervals, and thus may produce changes at a rate and of a magnitude that exceed the adaptive capacity of at least some biological systems. To find comparable events in Earth history, we need to look back tens of millions of years to rare catastrophic events.
Through September 29, researchers will present papers on issues such as the future of long-term energy demand, uses of atmospheric sampling, the value of autonomous underwater vehicles for monitoring the ocean, the carbon cycle in Africa, comparisons of climate/carbon models and actual atmospheric measurements, and crafting an effective response to CO2 build-up. (The links here go to abstracts; the proceedings will be available on the ICDC7 website once the event begins.)
Expect some real news to come out of this conference, and expect that the mainstream media in the US will be picking up more of it than they might otherwise (the BBC is likely to have substantive coverage, as well, but this is just the sort of thing they tend to follow closely). Katrina -- and now Rita -- has sensitized the America press to the risks arising from intense weather events. Given the increasingly clear connection between hurricane strength and a warming climate, news about what we can expect from -- and what we can do about -- global warming is likely to draw some attention.
As an added bonus, below is a graphic from the ICDC7 website showing the geographic distribution of increased CO2 buildup 1994-2003.
Three dimensional representation of the latitudinal distribution of atmospheric CO2.
